I am pleased to announce that Skycure has completed a $16.5 million series B investment, led by Foundation Capital and supported by all previous investors. With the additional capital, we will be able to expand our presence in EMEA and APAC, broaden our foothold with Global 1000 customers, and invest in further development of our award-winning mobile threat defense platform.

Partnering with Foundation Capital helps us in other ways as well, and among them is the opportunity to add Paul Holland to our board. Paul previously invested in our partner MobileIron, and rounds out representation from the top three EMM vendors, adding to Jayaram Bhat, former CEO of Zenprise (now Citrix) and Peter McKay, formerly of VMware AirWatch. Paul also brings critical skills and experience, like scaling sales from early stages all the way to IPO.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Paul Holland to chat about his perspective on investing, security, and most importantly – Why Skycure?

ADI: Why mobile security and why now?PAUL: Businesses and other organizations have widely embraced the practice of BYOD (bring your own device). While this has been a boon to productivity, it makes employees and enterprises vulnerable to a host of security and privacy threats, including theft of employee credentials and sensitive information, attacks by hackers, and damage to critical systems. Our research told us there was a huge market opportunity for a company that could provide effective protection against these threats, which is what led us to Skycure.

ADI: How many companies do you evaluate in a year and how many do you invest in?PAUL: We evaluate 3000-4000 companies a year and invests in about 10 of them.

ADI: What do you look for when investing in companies?PAUL: We look for large emerging markets, compelling product offerings, deep intellectual property, and the strongest products on the market. We also look for companies with very strong founding teams.

ADI: What are the key reasons for investing in Skycure?PAUL: Skycure checks all of the boxes in my answer to the prior question about what we look for in companies. Mobile security is a huge and burgeoning market. And Skycure has the most innovative mobile security products in that market. What’s more—not to embarrass you—we were extremely impressed with the combination of you and Yair. Your entrepreneurial skill and prior success together make Skycure as sure a bet as you can find as an investor.

ADI: What is the gap you see Skycure filling in the mobile security market?PAUL: There are myriad threats and myriad points of attack on mobile security now: rogue networks, malware, content manipulation, and so on. Skycure’s multilayered approach to mobile security is the most innovative and comprehensive solution we’ve encountered, to protect enterprises from all known threats.

ADI: What according to you are the key differentiators for Skycure?PAUL: Aside from the basics that we discussed previously, I think there are three things that jump out to distinguish Skycure from everyone else in this market. First, we found that Skycure has the broadest protection against all of the various types of attacks. Second, the depth of threat intelligence seems unmatched, with a superset of the device and server approaches of other vendors, plus the unique crowd-sourced intelligence collected from every Skycure app in the world. Lastly, I have been impressed with the Skycure Research Labs, a team dedicated to thinking like hackers by persistently identifying new ways to hack into mobile devices. What was impressive is that they have discovered at least one vulnerability in each major iOS release that Apple has acknowledged and patched. This kind of thinking and effort is critical in order to stay ahead of the bad guys and the competition.

ADI: Thank you, Paul. Welcome to the Skycure family!

For the other side of the story, here’s Paul interviewing Adi about why Skycure chose Foundation as an investor.

Adi Sharabani is CEO and co-founder at Skycure. A world-renowned expert in enterprise software and mobile security, Adi is a Top-Rated Speaker at RSA and other security conferences. Before launching Skycure, Adi built and led Watchfire’s security group and later oversaw security for IBM software products. Adi holds more than 25 patents and earned a BSc in Mathematics and Physics from Tel Aviv University. Committed to cyber security education, Adi has been a teacher and education advisor, playing a key role in the vision and implementation of the cyber defense curriculum for high school students in Israel majoring in cyber security.